International seminar `Digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage'

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he international seminar `Digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage'

accompanying the first meeting of the KT-DigiCULT-BG project was held at the Congress Centre of Bulgaria Hotel, Bansko, Bulgaria, from 27 August to 3 September 2004. The event attracted some 50 par-ticipants from 15 countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, France, the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Serbia and Montenegro, Turkey, UK and the USA. Project partners, international guests, and representatives of cultural and scientific heritage institutions from Bulgaria took part in the event.

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he programme of the event combined presentations and visits to cultural/

scientific heritage sites in South Western Bulgaria. The sessions of the event were grouped in two basic tracks:· Sessions related to KT-DigiCULT- BG (Knowledge Transfer for Digitisation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage in

Bulgaria), a four-year project, supported by the Transfer of Knowledge action of the Marie Curie programme of FP6; · Discussions on general issues in the field of digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage.

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he kick-off meeting of the KT-DigiCULT-BG project aimed to

acquaint project partners with general guidelines for administrative, financial and quality management issues. The project co-ordinator, Associate Professor Dr Milena Dobreva, presented its basic characteris-tics and goals and expressed her strong belief that it will strengthen the experi-ence gained by the host institution ­ the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics (http://www.math.bas.bg/) ­ in the dig-itisation field and develop it further for the benefit of high-quality presentation of Bulgarian legacy in collaboration with national institutions from the cultural and scientific heritage sector. The representa-tives of the four partner institutions: Det Arnamagnæanske Institut, Københavns Universitet, Denmark (http://www.hum.ku.dk/ami/), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (http://www.tcd.ie/), Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (http://www.cuni.cz/), the National Center for Scientific Research `Demokritos', Athens, Greece (http://www.demokritos.gr/),and the host institution (the Institute for Mathematics and Informatics) discussed their specific roles within the project.

them dedicated to specific national expe-rience in the field of digitisation of cul-tural and scientific heritage. In particular, Giuliana De Francesco (Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, Rome, Italy) gave detailed information on the MINERVA project, Prof. Dr Bernd Wegner (Technical University, Berlin) raised some impor-tant topics of the digitisation of math-ematical heritage and the DML, ERAM and EMANI

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international projects, Prof.

Yasar Tonta (Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey) interpreted the difference between integrated and personalised digital infor-mation services, and Boris Shishkov (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands) expounded ideas on the application of elec-tronic brokers in the cultural heritage sector.